Frequent Slashdot Contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A federal judge has ruled that a school district didn't violate a student's free speech rights when it suspended her for a parody MySpace page she created calling her principal a sex addict who "hits on students". In the ruling, Judge James M. Munley made the curious argument that if the case involves a student publishing lewd and offensive speech outside of school on their own time, then the proper precedent-setting cases to look to, are cases involving students making offensive statements in school during school hours, not cases involving students making less-offensive statements outside of school on their own time. In other words, if you can't find prior caselaw where all of the factors are the same, then the lewd-speech issue is more significant than the issue of whether the speech was made in or out of school." Hit that magical link below to read the rest of these words.

The hype leading up to Spore was excessive. But then, so is the scope of the game; following the growth of a species from the cellular level to galactic domination was an ambitious goal, to say the least. Bringing evolution into the realm of entertainment was something Will Wright hoped and gambled he could do after the success of the Sim franchise. But rather than evolution, Spore became more about creation — creation that allows a single-player game to include the community, as well. It ties the various parts of the game together to make Spore very entertaining as a whole. Read on for my thoughts.

yroJJory writes to recommend a piece up at SFGate on the history of Silicon Valley and its roots in radio, accompanied by some great old photos. "When the Traitorous Eight [founders of Fairchild], as they're sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery — but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the 'Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley'... Roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better."

This past weekend I braved the tangled web of deceit and lies that is commercial air travel to haul myself out to Anaheim, CA for Blizzard Entertainment's first attempt at a convention, "Blizzcon". Like any con there were good times and bad times but considering they had turnout on par with other major conventions and the fact that this was their first pass at a solo con, the result was nothing less than the level of excellence that we have come to expect from Blizzard.

Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet. As Sanger writes, "A virtually identical version of this memoir is due to appear this summer in Open Sources 2.0, published by O'Reilly and edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone. The volume is to be a successor to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999)." Read on below for the story (continued tomorrow). Update: 04/20 19:19 GMT by T : Here's a link to the continuation of Sanger's memoir.

Mark Stone writes with a thoughtful look back at the year 2004 in open source, pointing out both major gains and inevitable uncertainties. He writes "2004 stands out as a year in which open source consolidated its position as a valuable and accepted approach to business and technology policy. A less obvious but significant trend underlies all of this: even as open source business models join the mainstream, the open source development model remains a mysterious process on which large technology companies struggle to capitalize. Key issues and developments have played out in four areas: legal, policy, business, and technology." Read on for the rest.

The postman brought me a review sample last week of what is without doubt the best thing to hit my keychain in ... well, since keys. It's Canary Wireless's Digital Hotspotter, a Wi-Fi signal finder which, despite a few quirks, is the best (and most sophisticated) of the current crop of cheap hand-held detectors. Read on for my review of the device, which was also mentioned in this detector round-up linked to last month.

The drive to be an evil genius is an easily understandable one. Riches, power, eventual fame, and plenty of minions to order around are just some of the perks of the vocation. Vivendi's Evil Genius (flash required) gives you the opportunity to exercise your lust for worldly power in a seriously stylish way. A rich musical score, tons of polish, and enough dastardly deeds to keep even Dr. Claw happy are the game's high points. An overabundance of micromanagement and a lack of proper GUI interaction marrs what have could been a classic in the strategy genre. Read on for a more in-depth examination of the first real-time strategy game whose tag line could have been "Mwahahahahahahahaha!"

FuzzyBad-Mofo writes "On 8/24/2004, I took the plunge and bought a Rio Karma digital music player. My needs were simple: Decent storage capacity, Linux friendly, and Ogg Vorbis compatible. The Karma has a generous 20 GB capacity, decent battery life, is OS-agnostic, and plays a wide variety of file formats, including Ogg." Read on for the rest of FuzzyBad-Mofo's review.

SeanCier writes "The SIGGraph 2004 conference showed off a lot of trends: high-dynamic-range (HDR) displays and video, suddenly ubiquitous general-purpose GPU programmability (it's not just for polygon shading anymore), 3D and high-colour displays, ever-more-refined fluid dynamics, crowd animation, and point-based graphics, to name just a few. But there was an unspoken undercurrent, a trend that's waiting to happen in the visual effects community, and happen in a big way: Open Source." Read on for more.

Ian Felton writes "PHP 5's official release occurred on July 13th, with a complete overhaul of object-oriented programming features and improved MySQL functions. These are sure to be great additions to the package for PHP developers. However, many of the changes to PHP are hinting at something that PHP developers might not necessarily like down the road." Read on for the rest of Felton's thoughts on the downside to corporate involvment in PHP's future.

Scott Ritchie ended up delivered an angry rebuttal to Friday's OSCON presentation on the credibility of election software: What's strange is that his rebuttal came in response to a talk he himself had just delivered. Ritchie doesn't have a split personality, and wasn't simply playing devil's advocate. He found himself, though, in the strange situation of having agreed (as a last minute stand-in) to deliver a presentation he hadn't yet had a chance to read, provided by Dr. Clive Boughton of Australian software developer Software Improvement. (Boughton is also a Computer Science lecturer at Australian National University.) Between agreeing to fill in and arriving at the conference, Ritchie found that Software Improvement was switching its eVACS voting software from a Free, open source software license (specifically, the GPL) to terms "even worse than that on MS's shared source," and decided to do something about it. (Read more below.)

Time-travel thriller Primer has already gained some festival attention (it won both the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and the Grand Jury Drama Prize at this year's Sundance), and OSCON attendees got a chance to watch the film last Thursday. Primer follows a stretch of time (better said, a series of timeloops) in the lives of a group of young engineers (Aaron, Abe, Robert and Phillip) whose day jobs are just a distraction necessary to pay for their real pursuit: tinkering in Aaron's garage, laboring to come up with the Big Idea that will attract VC funding and make them wildly rich. Two of them certainly find something valuable, but it doesn't lead to easy wealth. (Read on for the rest.)

tyleremerson writes "With today's film release of "I, Robot," the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launched a new website, 3 Laws Unsafe. 3 Laws Unsafe explores the non-fictional problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are they truly reasonable? 3 Laws Unsafe tries to address this question." Reader Rob Carr has submitted a review of the movie, below, that he promises is spoiler-free.

nsayer writes "My wife and I just took delivery of an EyeTV 500 - Elgato's brand-new box for U.S. over-the-air digital television. Elgato makes PVR hard- and software for Macs. With the 500, HDTV reception and recording functionality has arrived for the Macintosh." Pudge reviewed the original (USB, NTSC) EyeTV nearly two years ago; read on for the rest of nsayer's review of the FireWire-based 500 model (first mentioned earlier this month). The 500 will play back both standard and high-definition digital signals, but only broadcast, not cable.

Update: 06/30 15:42 GMT by T : This article has been pulled; the Spider-Man 2 review which appeared here was reposted without credit or permission from chud. (Read it in its original context.) We welcome original feature-length articles, but not plagiarism.

xerid writes "I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and the theatre was packed & sold out for each showing. Today, I read on Michael Moore.com about the movie breaking records. However, what I haven't seen was coverage on Slashdot, about the movie's opening day." I saw the film on friday and was really impressed. But while it speaks much truth, and has many funny parts as well as truly heartbreaking ones, I don't know how many votes it will sway. But since there is very little other news so far today, why not talk amongst yourselves!

Comte writes "About three hundred charter members, local sci-fi cognoscenti and assorted geeks got a sneak peek last night of Paul Allen's $22 mm Science Fiction Museum prior to its official grand opening this Friday." Comte peeked, and contributes his impressions of the museum -- read on below to see what it's like. If you're in Seattle with a few hours, he says it's worth dropping in. (The rest of the text is his.)

Lucasfan04 writes "Apparently a few clips leaked out from the upcoming Star Wars Trilogy DVD. They're from George Lucas' audio commentary, and you can hear him talking about the films. Five 3-minute or so clips are featured."

Sex, liquor and gambling are not Las Vegas' only tempting vices -- there are electronics, too. The 2004 Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing. Below is a informal report from the show floor: I've been walking around the place ogling flat screens of all varieties (plus one close-to-flat screen, details below) and seeking the elusive perfect portable music player I'm after. Read on to learn about some of the interesting products being hawked, and about some things for which you'll have to wait.